well i'm not sure.....

i don't think things have changed that much - perhaps people don't have a response, or are not particularly interest in the subject.

frankly i don't quite understand where you're coming from on this one (no offence) - i'd understand 'peace' in reference to egypt vis a vie israel, muslim brotherhood, etc., but in regard to a long awaited revolution (if it gets that far) against 30 years of military law by a dictator who wants to put his son in power.....

be that as it may - nice work......

"A sense of family of sorts."

Sadly and I don't know why, that seems does seem to have gone.
I agree, it was one thing that set us apart from the rest of the mob. Grazie referred to us as a "church" and that to me hit the nail on the head although "family" is just as apt. We aren't perfect, sometimes we say stupid things (I excel at that) but we tolerate each other out of a common shared interest.

As to these events, seem kind of inevitable and I think we'll see more of them. Politics and religion are way more devisive topics than NLEs. Given how heated discussions about NLEs become around here introducing politics and religion.... Better left for other places.

Bob.

Given your interests you might enjoy this.



On a more on topic bent, I've never come accross anyone with skin that could suck in light like that gent. Shot FullHD 50i, de-interlaced with Mike Crash's Smart De-interlacer and encoded to H.264 using the Sony AVC encoder at 6Mbps.
Audio, Rode NT4 sitting just out of shot on the floor, not good, every surface in that living room was hard.
I'd tried to direct the interviewer, told her to stop trying to read her lines and just ad lib to no avail, it was after midnight so I just gave up.

Bob.

ushere,

In terms of the use of the word "peace" in a revolution contest, yes, it may seem a bit odd but the reason is that that word is woven into Islamic as well as Arab culture very deeply. In terms of religion, once example: "May peace be upon him" is added any time Mohammed of the Qu'ran's words or name is uttered or written.

Then there are all the variations from one end to the other of the Islamic world of the more mundane yet still religion-rooted saying -- salah salam Asalam Alekhum (and several others I couldn't publish here due to character translation problems). Even Farsi has a variation "Khoda Hafez" more rooted in Zoroastrian tradition but which means the same thing.

Much like the Hindu "Namasté," that in its Sanskit roots translates as "the Light (Divine/Etc.) in me acknowledges the Light in you" has lost its original meaning when used as now more often as a "Hello" or "Good bye" etc., it still does carry the subtle aura of its original meaning by many in India too.

Now, the other reason that I used it that is far less cultural, is that it's all I had in Arabic from a previous video project of mine from a few years ago in both Arabic and English -- besides the first few paragraphs of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights included in the video. I need to do something fast, simple and short.

So, in that sense, I cheated -- but it also happened to be appropriate as per explanation above, IMO :o)

As to your comment on the video itself, thanks. As some of the people that I've interacted with over the years would probably say... "Well, at least the boy has made some fair progress" in terms of editing chops. Or at least I hope they would say that - lol.

farss,

I'm glad you actually jumped in here for I was actually thinking of sending you a short note/query on whether I was maybe just imagining things in terms of the shift in the family/community feel thing.

The Pavarotti thing one still stands out for some reason (am not even into opera though get chills with a couple of his classic renditions) as do the holiday banter and pic-sharing, etc. And I too have uttered a few dumbass things in the past...

Well, time marches on and things change. Gotta deal with it.

As to the subject of the Middle East -- and by extension politics/religion -- I agree that such subjects can be far more divisive than Mac vs. PC, this-NLE-vs.-that-NLE (though we've all seen some pretty heated stuff in those arenas too). The latter are more or less tools, the former are about life-outlook and philiosophie-de-vie so they can be contentious.

Likewise, interests vary widely. I just happen to have had a longstanding interest in the Middle East so I lean in that direction when things like this happen.

In terms of your interview video, I feel for you as the "director" in part because one can't un-stilt a stilted performance no matter how well one shoots or lights something.

And forgive me, Bob, but frankly I couldn't watch much of it for while I am rather met'fizzically inclined in my somewhat rebel "non-religious/spiritual" way, I have a short fuse or attention span--especially in terms of spiritual subjects:

--- If anything takes more than a minute to explain, it just loses my interest. And while I respect the sense of reverence that can prompt people to act or present things in certain ways (to each his or her own, live and let live, etc.),too much pomp and circumstance just gets on my nerves.

I'm sort of a quasi-Zen K.I.S.S*.-It (*Keep It Simple, Sweetheart) wizeguy -- albeit still somewhat of a die-hard, dreamer-dude one too.

yep, the middle-east is a hot bed of opinions and certainly outweighs anything avid, fcp, vegas can come up with ;-)

my perspective: article

ushere,

Intense article, for sure. One of the few classes in my short-lived and eventually un-finished stint in college back during the heydays of Woodward/Bernstein when everyone one wanted to be a journalist (mid-70s), the only class that really fired me up was a a political science one on the Arab-Israeli conflict. In part due to simple age-related rebelious-ness, I decided to look into the "Arab side" of the 1948/Independence of Israel period. It opened my eyes.

But truth is, every religion and culture has its dark and light sides.
All over this planet.

To me, the bottom line about the Middle East is summed up in one part of an Op-Ed format article "A Letter to Al Qaeda and Anyone Else" I wrote back in 2004 when I was submitting spec speech material to the John Kerry campaign.

"Our Arab friend had spoken of this in his own way: "All this killing for so long among the three religions of Ibrahim! But I ask you: When you get to heaven, do you really think the Divine will take sides?" You may ridicule his childlike, grief stricken anger, but I dare you to argue with Truth."

While worded far differently in the article due to target audience, the bottom line for me is:

As long as the "my God is better/bigger than you God" is going on that underlies much of this conflict, nothing will really get solved. Sure, it's very layered in terms of economic opportunities and so on. But that core thing has been fueling the mess there for eons.

At some point (this may take a while, no doubt) people are going to have to upgrade their spiritual views to fit reality and modern times. If find it both sad and promising that we humans have no problem accepting quantum leaps in technology and medicine every single day, but...

... when it comes to religion, so many are still clinging to words and perceptions written on now-gone parchments from centuries ago.

It's kind of like our collective consciousness has this thing going something like this..."Next generation Twitter,Facbook, I-Pad, satellite TV, global village, no problem. But keep your hands off my of Parchments that "can't" be upgraded because.... (fill in the blanks)."

But maybe we're hinting at ourselves through technology and science acceptance of progress that we can take some quantum leaps in those areas too. Eventually.

And I'd better shut up here before I do start some controversy...

Oh, and since I'm indulging in such pontifications and I created this mess here, I might as well indulge myself a bit more.
Below are the reduced size versions of the still artwork that preceded, fueled and then followed the vid ditty.

The "Egyptian peace child" one is the latest and I'm tempted to add it as a coda/punchline to the video, but since the video already has been posted and shared at various places on the Net, it would just complicate things. Maybe I'll add it one day.

And I could write a thesis on the Hadith quotation below and why so few seem to remember its point.
But I'd probably have a brain meltdown and I could really get into some trouble there...

Leslie,

Wow, so it is Israel who is the bad guy in the conflict and those gentle, culturally advanced, peace lovers from Hamas and the Gaza Strip are the good guys after all. Thanks for clearing everything up in that fair and well balanced piece of writing.

Erik

Em? Couple of points, dear hearts:

@ Soniclight: I'm sure you know this, but that's not an Egyptian Peace Sign. Originally it was developed here, in the UK in 1958 to represent the semaphore flag letters N and D in turn to represent Nuclear Disarmament, and was used widely FOR the "Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament" (CND). Now, and since then, it has been used as a globally adopted PEACE symbol. Sure, it's a nice thought that something created in 1958 UK and adopted by the CND, is now accepted worldwide. But Egyptian? Eh, not so much. How well would the concept of Nuclear Disarmament go down with those wishing to develop their own "special" devices? What do you think?

@ Bob (farss): Bob my actual reference was to us Users as coming from a "Broad Church", which implies an ironic view that there are any number of different Users who simultaneously do NOT abide by one set of NLE rules or paradigms - hence a Broad Church. Saying we are a "church" was never my intention and somewhat defeats the purpose and poise of what I was driving at. But it is ironic that you have shortened this to a Church.

Here are my actual Broad Church example references:

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=500955Broad Church (1)[/link]

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=487102 . . a Broad Church (2) . . [/link]

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=412828 . . . a Broad Church (3)[/link]

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=356652 . .a Broad Church (4)[/link]

These are a couple of points for clarity.

Grazie

Grazie,

I am well aware of the history of "the" peace sign and I even have a 4"x4" white-on-black patch of it on my motorcycle jacket. My calling it "An Egyptian Peace Sign" was in part double-entendre and due to my tweaking of the Egyptian flag with it in said video/artwork. Bottom line: I granted myself some creative license, so to speak :o)

Good.

Grazie

BTW/P.S. to Grazie: That said "Egyptian peace sign" is green within this project is intentional: green is considered a spiritual color in parts of the Islamic world.

@erikd

well, one thing's for sure, i'm not going to argue for either side since neither deserves any support (and both get it from the usa anyway!).

suffice to say i believe they're both as bad as each other. that's why i'm on a weekend pass looking for the pyramids here in australia (as far from the maddening crowd as possible, oh, and i still haven't found the pyramids!).

btw. if you noticed the date on that article hamas and hezbollah weren't around in those days, and israel only has itself to blame for their creation / rise.

ushere & erikd

As Bob warned, such subjects can get contentious really fast.

Likewise, it seems to me that we can all see that both sides have had and have their faults. I have much admiration for Israelis and also feel for the Palestinians. Having visited both sides of the Arab-Israeli tensions right after the 6-Day War taught me perspective that has stayed with me ever since.

I may have only been 13, but it was a life-changing summer...

... I sat on a blown-up Jordanian tank on the way to the Dead Sea, I visited a kibbutz, planted a tree for the then new Israeli re-forestation program at the time, I walked among Bedouins in Lebanon, I was in Egypt during Russian dominance as the son of U.S. journalist (our hotel room was bugged by security services as far as he could tell), and the list of "wow..." experiences goes on during that summer.

Hey, I even got excommunicated by a really angry Greek Orthodox priest because I was climbing up one of the towering Cedars of Lebanon (considered holy ground) and kept a few needles as souvenirs. My Dad told him to chill out :o)

And last, as stated earlier, I also studied the lead up to the creation of Israel (the Jewish resistance fighters were considered terrorists by the British and other back then). And if you want to look at overall hypocrisy, what about the U.S. -- were the Colonists not also considered "terrorists"?

And we can go through just about every other country's founding with this.
And every religion...

"Bob my actual reference was to us Users as coming from a "Broad Church""

My apologies for misquoting you, for some reason only the "church" part stayed in my brain. I have to say until you brought this up I never realised that Broad Church was a specific reference, interesting as I was raised an Anglican, in a Low Church kind of way. I had an aunty who was High Church, just never heard the term Broad Church so I might have taken it to mean just a wide church, more akin to "catholic" and thought that "church" alone described what you meant, a group of people who share something but come come from diverse places.

Again my apologies. Very interesting what's happened in my head with this and perhaps again an example of how words on a page can be so easily missunderstood.

Bob.

Leslie,
I have to say you sure cut a dashing figure back then, not that the years haven't been kinder to you than me.

Serious congratulations for standing up for what you felt was right. An old saying about evil and good men doing nothing comes to mind. The question now is not who started it but how the bloody hell it'll be ended.


Bob.

One of the more interesting of recent threads ...

Similar to you, Soniclight, I have always been a spiritual traveller, and the deeper I go on this journey, the less able I become to associate myself with a label such as Christian, Jew, Muslim, Video Producer ... etc., although I have very good friends who would identify themselves with one or more of these, and many other labels.

All are variations of form - creations of the mind, and as such, all are self-imposed limitations.

When I really look in on myself, I see nothing but a conscious awareness in which all this is happening. It is so easy to attach oneself and identify with a particular set of ideas, but whenever I do, I know I miss out on reality.

I have been part of this Vegas "family" since 2001, and I have often used this forum to go beyond the immediate requirements of editing video.
Long may it continue.
sincerely
Peter

Peter,

Hmmm. Seems like we've write-talked here before, quite a while back (years? :o)
I leave my more core met'fizzical view (and some experiences) off this board for that gets into some rather personal stuff.

And/but I agree/resonate to the essence of what you are describing. I'm essentially a "non-dualist" dealing with duality - just like every other person in this experience of time and space, so to speak. Fairly conscious/aware, I am -- enlightened or holy or even that together -- I'm not - lol.

So It's easier for me to yak geo-politics, general religion, culture and such here in terms of the occasional OT topic.

Bob

"An old saying about evil and good men doing nothing comes to mind.

Hear hear, mate! :o)

bob - i've seen pics of you in a leather jacket looking pretty bloody cool..... but i suppose back then we didn't have to carry the extra weight of experience around our waist ;-)

truth be told, my motto is 'better a live coward than a dead hero'. if i'd stayed in israel i probably would have been the latter - and i'm not sure at whose hands.

Strange ...... I thought I had logged onto the Sony Vegas forum, must have done a typo ........

Anthony

"Strange ...... I thought I had logged onto the Sony Vegas forum, must have done a typo ........"

Nope, this:



Normal programming will resume shortly.

Bob.